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Monday, March 21, 2011

I haven’t done a very good job at keeping up with the PhraseMeme blog (too busy coding :-), but the WP7Comp contest sponsored by Microsoft and Red Gate is scheduled to announce a winner at the end of March and the anticipation is killing me! I have two entries in the competition: WinFone Alpha and PhraseMeme Scanner, and I have spent a fair amount of time looking over all of the other entries to see what the competition is up to. Many of the entries are very good, and I honestly have no idea who they will choose as the winners, but I wanted to see where I was at and what my chances might be.

One of the grading criteria is generating a “social buzz” on the WP7Comp website, but the competition’s website does not make it very easy to navigate around or see which entry is getting the most buzz. Because of this I decided to modify an old Resolver One spreadsheet that I made a while back that uses WatiN to create an IronPython powered spreadsheet for simple Web page automation and testing. This lets me scrape information from websites and load it into a grid for sorting and processing, and worked perfect for generating stats for each entry on the WP7Comp website.

So after an hour or two of work I was able to get all of the entries filled into one spreadsheet, with the number of Likes, Comments, and Reactions for each. It turns out that while there are a number of entries with more likes and comments than mine, the entry for PhraseMeme Scanner is currently in the top 15 for total number of Likes, which is better than I expected considering the barrage of last minute entries. If you are interested you can see the charts above/below for more details or access the full spreadsheet on Google Docs.

Thanks. I wanted to add more to the graph, but things started to get pretty crowded. I figured other WP7 devs would be interested in seeing their stats, so the spreadsheet should give you all the details. Also I <3 XKCD and tend to use it whenever I can.